《民族国家概论第二讲英文文章8-26页.》.pdf

Nationalism and Modernity is a modern discipline. It was called into being by the emergence of a new type of social reality, heralded by the French Revolution and accompanied (some would say pro- duced) by the Industrial one (Berger, Berger, and Kellner, 1973; Nisbet, 1966), which both prompted and made possible the reexamination of society as such. Th e new society replaced the traditional social order in Europe, the ancient regime, and, the opposition between ancients and moderns being a long tradition (Black, 1966), was called modern. Th e nature of modern society and the conditions of transition to modernity (of modernization) have been at the center of concerns that preoccupied sociology since its earliest days (Eisenstadt, 1985, pp . 7—24). It was on this, after all, although perhaps differently phrased, that the great proto-sociologists, Tocqueville and Marx, as well as the founding fathers of the discipline, Durkheim and Weber, focused. This venerable tradition has been continued on this continent in the form of modernization theory and later, somewhat euphemistically, theory of develop- ment. Tradition weighs heavily on the study of modern society. Our views of it are still to a large extent defined by the ideas of our (disciplinary) fathers. It is rarely recognized that the perspective reflected in these ideas was necessarily limited, that for the lack of empirical evidence (the newness of modernity and the lack of experience with it) they had to be highly speculative. Th e only thing that was known to the first theorists of modernity was the nature of the social order it came to